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Lord Thomas of Swynnerton

Historian renowned for an award-winning book on the Spanish civil war and a memorable literary dinner for Margaret Thatcher

May 9 2017, 12:01am, The Times

Lord Thomas, pictured in 1984, was chairman of the Centre for Policy StudiesJOHN VOOS FOR THE TIMES

One autumn night in 1982, Margaret Thatcher was driven in a government Daimler from Downing Street to a house in Ladbroke Grove. The occasion was a quite extraordinary dinner party. She entered without fanfare. One of the other guests, indeed, had to whisper to the host, the historian Hugh Thomas, who had recently been created Baron Thomas of Swynnerton: “Behind you!”

An impromptu receiving line formed with a sense of each side sizing the other up. The prime minister was wearing blue and it made her stand out among the grey and black suits worn by the other guests, almost two dozen of them, all men. They amounted to a who’s who of literary London. As well as the poets Stephen Spender and Philip Larkin,…

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